Daniel Hammond

I have modelled the lego car, using an online lesson tutorial. It was super simple to follow along to and took no longer than an hour. I really like the way the car ended up looking as well. I've never modelled anything that looks like Lego or even a car, I've only really ever modelled organic objects like flowers, trees, etc. So this was a good learning experience and a fun time to model.  

 Today we covered masks and selection tools, finishing the basics of Photoshop. Same thing as last time, we went into the software, given various images and files and were taught live how to solve issues and use the various tools.  How the mask tool works: The mask tool is activated by clicking the rectangle with a hole in it within the layers tab. You can then use the brush tool and draw in bits of the images you'd like covered and effectively erased but, not gone and the same goes for brushing in what is not masked. All by using the brush tool and two colours black and white; black masks the image and white uncovers it.  The selection tools work in various ways, the magic wand tool selects freely, the quick selection tool selects what you drag the tool over and acts like a brush in the way you can make it bigger or smaller for higher precision. The other brushes all act differently but are more or less the same, some are shaped and others are just lines until you create...

Pipe City: I started researching into different ideas and concepts for the city full of pipes and porcelain and looked into different types of pipes. Finding references of different types of pipes and the typical cogs used for pipes and what not. As well as, blueprints for houses showing the plumbing behind them so if I could get a general idea as to how just the pipes in a home would look. The more I looked into and gathered images of pipe work and read more into the description of the city, I noticed that the author said only porcelain was left with the pipe work. Then started looking into buildings made entirely of porcelain. Which lead to me discovering a couple buildings and structures in China. Which gave me ideas to make up some buildings made of porcelain and pipe work and build up a city  from that, which I think is an interesting concept. Then as I started to thumbnail those ideas it lead time to think about a place called Markarth in Skyrim which was of Dwarven origin an...

 I read through all the pages from the Invisible Cities document and wrote a sentence describing my basic understanding off all cities along with a thumbnail of my initial ideas for each.  The brief sentences I wrote for the cities going 1-14 were: A city made up of pipes, no brickwork. A city made up of earth respecters/haters living up on stilts above ground observing the world with telescopes.  A city with big silver domes, bronze gods, lit up with multicoloured lamps. Bare and abandoned city, all that remains are strings connecting peoples past relationships. A zigzag of water canals working as roads with an equal amount of land. A city made of stone with a single building made of metal containing globes filled with models of what the city could have looked like in the past present and future. Wells and windmills taking water from a large body of water underground and holding it in giant vats. A clean city that gets refurbished daily, leaving piles of waste outside th...

 Today I was going to start working towards finishing the thumbnails for the Invisible Cities project but, life got in the way. I was going to try do 25 thumbnails a day, aiming for more than 100 thumbnails since the minimum was 100. So, as of tomorrow I will properly thumb-nailing the different cites then by next week I should have a good idea for which city I’d like to do concept art for so I can start planning landscapes and researching buildings. So by the end of the following week I can start the three paintings with over the course of that week. Leaving a week afterwards for adjustments and amendments. I’ll check back when I have 100+ thumbnails. 

 I had some practise drawing and sketching organic and man made structures today as well as some drawings being more focused on only using two to three tones to draw an image. I think I did okay with the drawings overall. However, I definitely struggled with the two tone drawing and one of the castle drawings I think went pretty poorly compared to the other one. My favourite drawing of the day would have to be the first castle drawing and the organic tree drawings. I think out of all of the drawings they are the three that read the best. All the drawings other than the castle drawings were given a time limit of 10 minutes. We had a total of 45 minutes to draw the castles. 

 Today I was taught some basics in Autodesk Maya, I have used 3D software in the past (Autodesk Maya and Blender) however, I haven't used the software in a while so today was a good recap. We went over things like: how to navigate the view port, hot keys for common tools like the translate/move, scale and rotate tools, how to use the 'function' keys to go through different task sets in Maya, different view ports, the timeline and range slider and how to reset the workspace. This was the first thing I created after being reminded of Maya's controls and tools. Maya Basics: Function Keys switch task modes. To set a project go to File, then set project or project window. Selection tools:  Move/translate = W Scale = R Rotate = E The two different view ports are the normal view and the four pane view which can be accessed using the space key. Timeline and range slider can be found at the bottom of the screen and control frames and frame rates in animations. Axis: X = Horizont...

 I had my first life drawing class today. I had done life drawing before though it was a few years ago now and I also haven't used charcoal in an incredibly long time. Despite this i'm pretty happy with my drawings. The life model who we were supposed to be drawing couldn't make it today, so we drew each other.  When drawing I found that I was using the stick of charcoal as a pencil rather than a stick of charcoal, and using the side of the stick to get a less dark and permanent line. I also for some reason didn't realise I could use a rubber instead of spreading the charcoal as thin as possible using my finger when a line didn't go to plan. But overall, I think I did okay with all the drawings I started with the drawing in the bottom right then, after that my shoulder started to really ache and I realised my focus started to really drift towards drawing the final drawing. Though, i'm pretty happy with the fact that all my drawings read well, I think it's pr...

 Today, we worked on more two more principles of animation: timing and spacing. By animating a "coin" which in my case is a red circle against guide lines, to show the effectiveness timing and spacing can have in making an animation look more realistic when it doesn't follow a set distance or timing. In the video there are four animations total; two showing the flawed method and the other two showing what the coin swing can look like with diverse spacing and timing. I begin I made up a workspace 1920x1080p (HD) and set it to 24fps. When I started the animation I used the line tool ('N' on the keyboard), and drew 24 straight lines going downward across both an equal distance and 24 lines spread apart unevenly on one layer. Then on a second layer drew two sets of 24 lines swinging in a pendulum motion, again one spread and the other evenly spread. Using the line tool to create an arc to draw the lines in the pendulum to so the arc follows a good swing. To do this I ...

 Today we were taught some of the key tools and functions in Adobe Photoshop, learning how to use: clipping masks, eraser tools, layer adjustments, blending modes, move tools, scale tools and rotation tools. By using pre-made Photoshop files and being taught the tools and their functions live. Move Tools: We started by learning the 'move', 'scale', and 'rotation' tools by editing a Photoshop file with three misplaced cupcakes of all different sizes and placements, on different layers, sitting below a plate. The first cupcake on the left was already the right size and rotation so all we had to do was use the 'move tool' which is a white arrow (Control+V) that allows the user to simply move a layers image around the screen. The second cupcake was too small and needed to be sized up to match the first cupcake, to do this we used the 'transform' tool (Control+T) and using the points on either corner of the square surrounding the cupcake, scaled the c...

 I practised drawing thumbnails, trying to design interesting landscapes focused on perspectives, horizon lines and vanishing points.  To start I drew a box 16x8cm and filled it with 12 smaller boxes of varied size, making sure to draw some boxes portrait and some landscape to design an interesting layout on the page to work with. Afterwards, I went through each box, drawing in a horizon line, some straight through the middle of the box and others slanted or placed higher or lower in the boxes. Once my horizon lines were drawn, I placed a single vanishing point on the horizon lines indicating where the perspective should be aiming for and where the point of view shrinks and vanishes from sight. The final step before I could start jotting down ideas for landscapes was to then, draw 'C' curves and 'S' curves from the vanishing points to random points in the boxes to give insight to the distance and perspectives within the thumbnails. I think my designs were all okay and f...

I was set the task of animating a drawing of my face change and morph into a fruit, then an animal and then back to my face in Adobe Animate. It was quite fun to animate, I started by creating a new workspace at 1920x1080p (pixels) and 24fps (frames per second). Drawing three keyframes one of my face, a banana and a Hammerhead Shark with some frames in-between to fill in the gaps and animate the transition.  I was taught to fill in the in-between frames by going to the centre frame in-between each  keyframe and drawing a mixture of the two keyframes using the 'Onion Skin' feature; which allows you to see an outline of different frames with lowered opacity using two adjustable brackets on the timeline. Then once I had that, I did the process again, this time going to the centre frame of the frame I just drew and a Keyframe and drawing that in-between frame. I did this process for all 57 frames of animation until the animation was complete.  The outcome I think turned out q...